1. Introduction

This document describes the support for fonts in XFree86.
Installing fonts is aimed at the
casual user wishing to install fonts in XFree86; the rest of the
document describes the font support in more detail.

We assume that you have some familiarity with digital fonts. If anything
is not clear to you, please consult
Appendix: Background at the end of this document for background
information.

1.1. Two font systems

XFree86 includes two font systems: the core X11 fonts system, which
is present in all implementations of X11, and the Xft fonts system,
which is not currently distributed with implementations of X11 that
are not based on XFree86 but will hopefully be included by them in
the future

The core X11 fonts system is directly derived from the fonts system
included with X11R1 in 1987, which could only use monochrome bitmap
fonts. Over the years, it has been more or less happily coerced into
dealing with scalable fonts and rotated glyphs.

Xft was designed from the start to provide good support for scalable
fonts, and do so efficiently. Unlike the core fonts system, it
supports features such as anti-aliasing and sub-pixel rasterisation.
Perhaps more importantly, it gives applications full control over the
way glyphs are rendered, making fine typesetting and WYSIWIG display
possible. Finally, it allows applications to use fonts that are not
installed system-wide for displaying documents with embedded fonts.

Xft is not compatible with the core fonts system: usage of Xft
requires making fairly extensive changes to toolkits (user-interface
libraries). While XFree86 will continue to maintain the core fonts
system, toolkit authors are encouraged to switch to Xft as soon as
possible.